World’s Tallest LEGO Tower Built By Students Of Red Clay School District In Wilmington, DE [PHOTOS]

The clock might have just struck back-to-school time, but students of the Red Clay school district in Delaware already have a big accomplishment to be proud of: They constructed the world’s tallest LEGO tower.

On Monday, Guinness World Records officials visited John Dickinson High School in Wilmington to inspect the contender for world’s tallest LEGO tower. According to Delaware Online, the new record holder is made out of 500,000 LEGO bricks, weighs almost a ton, and is exactly 112 feet, 11 ¾inches tall. At more than 10 stories high, it shatters the previous record, held by a 106-foot tower built in Prague in 2012.

The Guinness World Records officially declared it the tallest structure made of interlocking toy bricks ever built.

The tower was built almost entirely by students from the Red Clay School District over the summer and the last few days of the 2012-2013 school year. But volunteer contractors helped with the final assembly last week, placing the tower pieces together using cranes and lifts, Delaware Online reported.

The LEGO tower was made after the school district held a “brick drive” for students and area organizations to donate LEGOs. The plastic bricks are also built around a metal cylinder supported by guy-wires for safety to keep the tower from falling, Delaware Online reported. None of the bricks are glued, adhering to Guinness policy.

According to superintendent Ted Ammann, the district decided to build the LEGO tower in honor of its multimillion-dollar construction and renovation project. “We thought, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be great to do something with LEGOs?’ And then we started talking about trying to break this record,” Ammann told Delaware Online. “We knew it was going to be a huge task, but I knew we were up to it.”

Superintendent Mervin Daugherty finished the structure on Monday by placing the cap, a red schoolhouse, on the top of the tower. “This is really extraordinary. Usually these records are set by LEGO itself or by a country,” Daugherty said. “We did it with students and with a community. We did it together.”

Delaware Online reported the tower will stay up until Thursday, and then pieces of it will be distributed to classrooms as mementos.

“We want kids to get a message out of this,” Daugherty said. “One kid could never put this together. But when we all work together, when we’re all a team, we can do something that people probably thought would be impossible.”